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Saturday, June 17, 2017

You never know where you will end up when you start
researching some aspect of Chicago history, but it will certainly surprise you.
This phenomenon happened to me when I was researching James Carney, an early
Chicago (1820s-50s) Irish ancestor. I saw a listing in the 1839 ChicagoDirectory for James Carney, grocery and provision store. I wanted to find out
what early grocery stores carried and what determined their choice of inventory.

In order to understand what kind of goods a merchant in early
Chicago offered, one must first understand what his customers needed and wanted.
And who were these customers? The Indians, living in the northeastern part of
what was to become America and Canada, had long been trading furs and other
items with each other. The French were
the first Europeans to enter the fur trade in the New World in the early 16th
century and the Indians became their trading partners.

The
trappers camp-fire. A friendly visitor,

Published by Currier & Ives, 152 Nassau St., c1866,

Library of
Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Washington,
D.C. 20540 USApga.00935/

The French traders realized that in order to gain access to
the knowledge and the experience of the natives and to gain access to the fruit
of their hunting grounds, they had to earn their trust. Part of their outreach was for some of them
to join the Native American community through marriage.

Another reason for marrying into the Native American culture
was that Indian women were used to life on the frontier unlike European women.1 When the English came into the fur trade after the French, some English traders
also married Indian wives for the same reasons.

Since there were few Europeans other than traders and a native
population eager to trade in northeastern Illinois and eastern Canada, the
Indians formed the customer base of early trading posts and small grocery and
provision stores. It was the traders who
started these stores as they knew the Indian through business and social
connections. Most likely James Carney began his grocery with the Indian trade.

We know that the Indian was the main customer for the early
grocery stores, but what made him a very good trading partner? To find out the details of the fur trade in
and all around Chicago, I consulted four scholarly texts. The original source
was one Alfred H. Meyer, who provided the first in chain of citations:

Dr. Meyer made an exhaustive study of the history of
northeastern Indiana and northwestern Illinois from the time of the Native
American through pioneer settlement in 1850, gives more detail on the Indian
customer:

“Indians were the most profitable customers prior to 1840,
for many of the white settlers ran accounts which some of them were slow to pay
or sought to default. The Indians, on the other hand, most of whom were
Potawatomi, periodically brought in large quantities of cranberries and bundles
of furs which they traded for articles of food, clothing, or ornaments.”2

I now had some general idea of what the Indian customer
desired when he came to trade. But Dr.
Meyer goes on to list the inventory of the “leading store (he doesn’t give
us the name) in Chicago, at the corner of West Lake and West Water”:3

Three challenges appear with this inventory list. First, the
large number of items in the inventory (108) makes it necessary to organize
them in some way. I came across another inventory of the North West [Fur]Company in Grand Portage, MI from 1797 in a
publication by Dr. Bruce White. The items were divided by function/material
according in these categories: “Adornment, Alcohol, Ammunition, Amusement,
Animals, Blankets, Cloth, Clothing, Food, Garden, Guns, Medicine, Powder,
Tobacco, Tools, Utensils, and Writing.”4

The second challenge to the inventory list is the number of
items that are unfamiliar to most modern readers. I researched each item and
made a chart of definitions:

The third challenge to this list of inventory is locating
the original source. Where did the list come from? My research path led me through
the chain of citations, starting with Dr. Meyer. When I reached Charles Cleaver's research, I struck gold:

“After crossing the bridge,” [the bridge across the Chicago
River at Lake Street called Lake Street Bridge] “at the corner of West Lake and
West Water Streets, Bob [Robert A.] Kinzie …kept the largest store in town,
though chiefly filled with goods for the Indian trade. There was beside
Kinzie’s on the West-Side, but that would be about all, some three or four
small groceries where liquor was retailed.” 12

I had now identified the owner of the large grocery store. I
still had another challenge – locating the original source of the inventory
list.

By the time I found Hurlbut’s research, I was worried that I
might never find the source of the list. On p. 28 Hurlbut began a section called “TheAmerican Fur Company” where he discusses how some old records (including account books) of this
company now held at the Chicago History Museum.)

American Fur
Cos. buildings. Fond du Lac (back view),

1827, Library of Congress Washington,
D.C.

20540 US Am LC-USZ62-2087

Hurlbut quotes
several items from these records and at the end of the section, he prefaces the
inventory with these words:

“We will close this
article by giving a catalogue of goods furnished for the trade of the Chicago
country, fifty-three years ago." (Hurlbut wrote this in 1875, so 53 years past
would have been 1822.)13

But Hurlbut gave no specific source within the American Fur
Company documents. The closest that I could get to the actual source was an
inventory of these records written for the Chicago Historical Museum by Robert
D. Kozlow, American Fur Company records, 1816-1947. A search was done for me in the records
at the Chicago History Museum but nothing came up except a similar inventory
from another trading post, Lac du Flambeau of the North West Company in Wisconsin.
More on-site search of the records must be done.

I have been very intrigued by the tastes of the Native
American consumers at the early trading posts ever since I came upon the
inventory for Robert Kinzie’s store in Chicago in 1833-34. Remember my ancestor
James Carney had a grocery just a few years after (1839) in the same commercial
area.

You can learn about the needs/wants of a people (a subject
of great interest today to all the online retailers who track our purchases
with cookies) by looking at
what they purchase. How did the Indian traders prioritize the items they
bartered for? According to E.E. Rich (see section “The fur trade and economic anthropology”) noted scholar on the fur trade in the
Americas wrote:

“…the Indian would always supply himself first with powder
and shot. After that would come what the trader would call ‘necessaries’ and
what we would call luxuries—tobacco, spirits, gay cloth of different kinds,
beads and caps with articles such as ice-chisels, snow-glasses, and hatches
varying in priority.”14

There has been much research and discussion of the effect of
alcohol on the Indian tribes. In many sources one reads of how the fur traders
took advantage of the Indian customer by plying him with alcohol. But this has
been questioned by other sources:

“Perhaps surprising, given the emphasis that has been placed
on it in the historical literature, was the comparatively small role of alcohol
in the trade. At York Factory, Native traders received in 1740 a total of 494
gallons of brandy and “strong water,” which had a value of 1,976 made-beaver.
More than twice this amount was spent on tobacco in that year, nearly five
times was spent on firearms, twice was spent on cloth, and more was spent on
blankets and kettles than on alcohol. Thus, brandy, although a significant item
of trade, was by no means a dominant one. In addition, alcohol could hardly
have created serious social problems during this period. The amount received
would have allowed for no more than ten two-ounce drinks per year for the adult
Native population living in the region.”15

Professor Rich mentions the difference between European
perspective and values and those of the Native American throughout the article.
Much of the tension between the fur trader who wanted more furs and the Indian
(who was usually not the hunter but the middleman) who provided them came about
because of a difference in culture. The Indian was interested in the here and
now and would only bring sufficient furs to satisfy current needs, a prevailing
view of the Europeans involved in the fur trade and expressed by Andrew Graham, who began working for the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1749:

“…the Indian annually could get hold of between seventy and
a hundred made-beaver in furs without effort. For seventy made-beaver he could
fully satisfy all the wants which he would anticipate before he next came down
to trade and the other thirty for waste
and dissipation were all that he had time to spend before he had to leave the
plantation and begin his journey inland again. ”16

From this research project to find the source of the
inventory list, I learned how ethnocentrism can cloud even scholars’ eyes as
they analyze records and draw conclusions about different cultures. I was
fortunate to find Dr. Rich’s study on how the Native American culture differed
from the European and how this influenced the trade between them.

I also learned how much the fur trade played in the economic
beginnings of northeastern Illinois (including Chicago,) northwestern Indiana
and Canada. Before the railroads, the meat packing industry and the factories built
the Chicago we know today, there was the fur trade that laid the foundation for
the future economic blossoming of the city.

Thirdly, I learned about a pitfall of research and citation.
It is very important for a writer to include the original source of a record
that he/she cites. In his 1881 publication, Henry Hurlbut gave the original
source of the Chicago store inventory as part of the American Fur Company
accounts. But researchers that came after him did not include the provenance of
the inventory in their publications.

Finally, from the inventory list, I learned what my grocer
ancestor James Carney may have carried in his store around 1839. But he wasn’t
in the grocery business for the long haul. In 1840 he opened a brewery, one of
the earliest Chicagoans to do so. He probably faced two facts in making this
decision:

the fur trade with its profitable and reliable Indian customer base was coming to an end

beer was a popular product with the growing number of European immigrants and American-born persons flocking to Chicago

11Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American
Fur Trade, (Lincoln, NE, University of NE Press, 2006), p. 124.

12Dena Evelyn Shapiro, dissertation “Indian
Tribes and Trails of the Chicago Region: A Preliminary Study of the Influence
of the Indian on Early White Settlement” (Master of Arts dissertation, The
University of Chicago, March, 1929), p. 53.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

I don’t know about you, but I can’t get enough of Chicago
history. And I just discovered five books, and a re-issued early city directory
that have gone a long way to quenching my deep thirst to know how Chicago was
born, who the people were who came to Chicago in the early 1830s (the Native
Americans had been here long before), and where these first Chicagoans settled.
Here are the five reference books:

A History of Chicago,
Vol. 1, The Beginning of a City 1673-1848, Bessie Louise Pierce, The
University of Chicago, 1937, Chicago, IL. (Vol. 2 From Town to City 1848-1871, Vol. 3 The Rise of a Modern City 1871-1893)

History of Chicago,
Vol. 1,From the Earliest Period to
the Present Time, Alfred Theodore Andreas, A.T. Andreas publisher, 1884,
Chicago

One Hundred Years of
Land Values in Chicago: The Relationship of the Growth of Chicago to the Rise
of its Land Values, 1830-1933, Homer Hoyt, The University of Chicago, 1933,
Chicago, reprinted by Beard Books, Washington D.C., 2000.

Chicago’s First Half
Century, The City as it was Fifty Years Ago and as it is Today, The Inter
Ocean Publishing Company, 1883, Chicago, Illinois.

Both Pierce’s and Andreas’ books are well-researched,
greatly detailed histories in three volumes each where one learns about how the city
came to be and how it developed. The chronology
of the Catholic Church in Chicago by Father Garraghan gives an unexpected
concurrent history of the city that petitioned for and supported the Church.
The fourth book by Hoyt is a history of the ups and downs of land values in
Chicago which parallels the movement of the people within this great city. The
fifth source was published by the Inter Ocean Publishing Company in 1883. Although
it has a slight flavor of a chamber of commerce piece with advertising included,
it also provides a good introduction to life in nineteenth century Chicago and
a detailed look at early industries.

In addition to the five books, I found the Chicago City Directory for 1844 (re-printed and made widely available in 1892) to be a
valuable primary source for information on the beginning and rise of Chicago
from the 1830s. These words from p. 15-16 of the Directory perfectly describe
the reason for Chicago to be situated where it was and the reasons it was destined
for greatness:

“Situated on the waters of the only Great lake exclusively
within the United States – being the termination, on the one hand, of the
navigation of the Lakes, and on the other, of the Illinois and Michigan Canal –
affording great natural facilities for a harbor, by means of Chicago River and
its branches – having dependent upon it a region of country vast in extent and
of extraordinary fertility, it must always be the dividing point between two
great sections of the Union, where the productions of each must meet and pay
tribute.”

"Location of Chicago with Respect
to Water-Way Systems", Hoyt, p. 8.

One of my first questions about Chicago is when it was
incorporated as a town. When I explored my sources for the answer, I learned something
about the requirements needed for a village to become a town in addition to a
sufficient population. Once Chicago had grown past a few fur traders, and wives
and children joined the male pioneers, the desire for spiritual guidance grew. In his book on the Catholic Church in Chicago,
Father Garraghan states:

“Chicago was
incorporated as a town in June 1833….”p.36

But something important for the
spiritual growth of the area happened in April of 1833, two months before incorporation. In that month, a group
of the leaders of the Catholic faithful wrote up a petition, requesting a priest
be sent to Chicago to attend the spiritual needs of the population. (p. 45-46.)
According to Father Garraghan, there were 37 male heads of household who signed
the petition. But when you added the family
members who were listed after each male, the total came to 128. [The total population of Chicago in 1833 was about 350, Hoyt, p.19] Father
Garraghan tells his readers the ethnic background of this group:

“Catholics
other than those of French or Indian stock were few in Chicago in 1833.”

Father Garraghan gives the Protestants their due in his
narrative:

“…the year 1833 saw church organizations regularly established in
Chicago for the first time, three churches, Catholic, Presbyterian and Baptist
being founded during that year….” p. 52

Now we know when the town of Chicago was established and who
was there. Although Father Garraghan described the ethnic background of the
early Chicago Catholics, he didn’t do the same for the Protestant population. We do have the August 1833 poll list,
and can study the surnames to make guesses about ethnicity. To get a more exact
idea of the balance of ethnic groups in early Chicago’s population, we may
consult a table created by Bessie Louise Pierce in Vol. 2 of her history:

A History of Chicago, Vol. 1, The Beginning of a City 1673-1848, Bessie Louise Pierce, The University of Chicago, 1937, Chicago, IL. (Vol. 2From Town to City 1848-1871, Vol. 3The Rise of a Modern City 1871-1893)

With the knowledge of Chicago’s earliest population, we also
want to know where exactly the geographic beginning of our beloved city was.
According to the 1844 City Directory:

“CHICAGO, Cook County, Illinois, is situated on the Southwestern shore of
Lake Michigan, at the head of Lake navigation, in lat. 41 deg., 45 sec, North,
and long, 10 deg., 45 sec. West. The site of the City occupies a level prairie,
on both sides of the main stream, and the North and South Branches of Chicago
River, and covers an area of about three and a half miles in length, North and
South, and two and a half in breadth, East and West, about a mile and a half
square of which is already regularly built upon, and the streets opened and graded.” p. 5

A good idea of
the size and physical location of Chicago is well depicted on an 1830 map. Wikimedia
tells us that for early Chicago research, we are very fortunate that “The
Illinois and Michigan Canal Commissioners hired James Thompson, a surveyor…to
create Chicago’s first plat (map)...in 1830.”

By James Thompson
[Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

This is where
Chicago began. But for a visual representation of the early city, we have a
painting by Edgar Spier Cameron.

Chicago Its History
and Its Builders:

A Century of Marvelous Growth, Currey,

J. Seymour, The
S.J. Clarke Publishing

Company, Chicago, 1910. p. 11.

In Chicago’s
First Half-Century we read a description of what Cameron’s painting depicts:

“The first record of a postmaster’s appointment at Chicago is March 31, 1831,
and Jonathan N. Bailey, an Indian trader, opened his office on the east bank of
the river, in the store of John S.C. Hogan, at the corner of Lake and South
Water Streets.” p. 20

Chicago’s First Half-Century gives us a year-by-year chronicle of the
retail/wholesale beginnings and development of Chicago:

“Philo Carpenter had
the first store outside the post in 1833, and later P.F. W. Peck built a store.
Both these stores were on Water Street. Carpenter’s was near Franklin Street,
or rather where the road turned to go over the river at the point where Lake Street
bridge is now located.” p. 92 [only basic provisions were stocked in these stores]

One year later,
1834, again in Chicago’s First
Half-Century, we read:

“In 1834 there were no less than eight stores in
Chicago, and the village kept growing. A.G. Burley opened the first crockery
store, and he went so far as to build his store on the new street or road just
opened, and called Lake Street. Burley’s store was up near the point where
LaSalle Street is now located.” p. 92 (see Thompson map above.)

Two years later
in the same source we learn:

“In 1836 the village had grown to the proportions
of a town, and there were about fifty stores in the place. There were streets
as far south as Madison street, and as far north as Indiana street, with an
extension on the West Side of Lake street and Randolph street; and Canal and
Clinton streets were blocked out also.” p. 92

Homer Hoyt in his book One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago,
describes a primitive outpost, adding more details to what 1833 Chicago looked
like from personal letters:

·Granville T. Sprout wrote: “In 1833 there was a
row of business houses and cabins on South Water Street between State and Wells
Street and this was the principal street of the town.1

· JohnBates wrote: “There was nothing on Lake Street… except perhaps the
Catholic Church [Old St. Mary’s] begun on the northwest corner of Lake and
State.”2

·Rev. Jeremiah Porter stated: “The corner of
Clark and Lake in 1833 was a lonely spot almost inaccessible on account of
surrounding sloughs and bogs.”3

But in one year, by 1834, there was phenomenal growth in the
number of people in Chicago. According to Hoyt:

“…its population increased from
the 350 of the year before to 2,000.” p. 19

And Hoyt goes on to describe where
the commercial expansion took place:

“The principal growth of that year was
along Lake Street, but the corner of Lake and LaSalle streets was still so far
from the center of business that the construction of a four-story brick
building at that point was referred to as ‘Hubbard’s Folly.’ The construction
of a drawbridge over the main channel (of the Chicago River) at Dearborn Street
in 1834 had the effect of concentrating business near South Water and Dearborn
Street.” p. 19

Chicago’s First Half-Century, p. 16

With all this
growth, one might think that the frontier outpost was fast becoming a city. But
not according to a letter written by Mr. Enoch Chase describing Chicago in 1834
that Hoyt quotes:

“Besides the log cabin on the West Side (of the Chicago
River) kept by Mr. Stiles, there was a blacksmith shop. That was all. On the
North Side were John Kinzie’s house and a few others. On the South Side there
was one house south of Lake Street which was situated on the west side of Clark
Street….On Lake and South Water streets was the main village. Lake Street boasted
one brick block which belonged to Hubbard.” [I added one more sentence from
chase’s letter.] “Jim Kinzie’s store, P.F.W. Peck’s store, Harmon’s and
Loomis’s [again these stores carried only basic provisions] were all on South Water
Street.” 4

Another way to
chart where Chicago started and how/where it branched out from year to year is
to read Father Garraghan’s history of the building of Catholic churches in the
city:

“St. Mary’s, the first Catholic Church in Chicago, erected in 1833 by
Father St. Cyr on the south side of Lake Street near State….” p. 82

But as the
population grew, the first building could no longer hold all the congregants.
St. Mary’s moved to a larger space. Below is a photograph of St. Mary’s “in its
third and last location, on the south side of Madison Street between Wabash
Avenue and State Street.” p. 82.

Chicago History Museum, ICHi-37096.
J.H. Murphy, photographer

By 1846 there
were 1300 Catholics in Chicago, one-tenth the population of the city (p. 119,
Garraghan.) Although this number didn’t demand a large number of new churches
at the moment, estimates of future growth due to immigration caused BishopWilliam J. Quarterto
organize

“…three additional parishes, St. Patrick’s, St. Joseph’s and St.
Peter’s. St. Patrick’s Church…stood at the southwest corner of Desplaines and
Randolph Streets, on the west side of the river, where Irish immigrants had
begun to settle in large numbers.” p. 119

St. Joseph’s was
to serve German Catholics north of the Chicago River and “…stood at the
north-east corner of Cass and Superior Streets….” (p. 193 Garraghan) while St.
Peter’s, also serving the growing German Catholic population, was built south
of the Chicago River “…on the south side of Washington Street between Wells and
Franklin Streets.”5

Thus from the commercial and religious building in early
Chicago, we can chart the growth of the city from its meager beginnings. No one
who knows the city of today could imagine how it started one hundred and eighty-four
years ago. Those early pioneers had great imagination, fortitude, raw energy,
and steadfastness to risk all in such a wild and swampy prairie. With what
amazement would they now behold Chicago in the twenty-first century.

About Me

My first ten years were spent in Chicago, IL and the next ten in Tucson, Arizona. In 1967, I graduated from the University of Arizona with a degree in secondary education. I taught English in San Francisco public schools for twenty four years. Then I re-invented myself as a grants manager and held a variety of positions in local and state governmental agencies, colleges and universities in California and North Carolina. In 2003 I completed a Master's degree in Public Administration at San Francisco State University. Now I am retired and doing genealogy full time.